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Astia unites European Investor Community at second annual ‘Doing it Right’ London Programme for Entrepreneurs
(Flickr, photo credits: Ian Mutto)
If you are a startup with a woman on the team, and looking for additional funding, you can now apply for the Astia venture accelerator program for women-led high growth companies.
Astia, the premier Silicon Valley will host its Second European Investor Forum on 24th June 2010, following its ‘Doing it Right’ London Programme which takes place from 4th-7th May this year in cooperation with The NextWomen.
Known for its greater than 58% funding success rate, the eleven-year-old organisation is already achieving exceptional results in the UK, having launched here just last year. The success of Astia’s clients is credited to the broader Astia Community that sources, selects, and advises the companies that qualify for Astia’s prestigious programme.
“Astia has truly cultivated the networks required to source and showcase the next leaders in innovation and it continues to demonstrate the investment opportunity hidden in women entrepreneurs,” commented Prashant Shah, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Astia Board Chair.
The Doing It Right programme is open to select companies pursuing high growth, primarily from the high-tech, life science, media and clean-tech sectors. Participant companies receive access to a robust community of investors, entrepreneurs, corporations, and value-add service providers. Astia has cultivated a network of both men and women who lend their expertise and networks to accelerate the success of the companies.
“Our involvement in the Astia Doing it Right programme and Investor Forum in London has been fundamental to our business,” commented Elinor Olisa, Co-Director and Founder of Degree Art.com, a UK-based online portal for buyers interested in acquiring art from emerging artists. “We recommend Astia without a moment’s hesitation. It is a one-of-a-kind program that is absolutely packed with essential guidance, lessons, networking opportunities and support.” Read more
Breaking the VC Funding Glass Ceiling for Female Entrepreneurs
Astia, Spring Board Enterprise and a few other organisation are supporting high growth women-led companies to attract VC funding. The question arises why there should be a specific women focus when it comes to helping with funding. In this video, Kay Koplovitz of Spring Board Enterprises explains the reasoning.
Female Entrepreneur Startup Interview: “The MBA was the Stamp of Approval for my Fundraising”
Virginia Raemy, Founder of Talentpuzzle
Swiss born female entrepreneur Virginia Raemy is fairly relaxed about her new role as founder of start-up Talentpuzzle. “Its fun, I am enjoying it, I can be creative, and I can take full responsibility, and have no boss”.
She has reason to be content. She just received a couple of hundred thousands pounds of funding from the Venrex Fund and the Aspire Fund.. “And I have 2 smaller angel investors on board, because I was running out of cash at that time”, she says in a rather laid back manner.
Start of the Company: No US Partner But on Her Own
The idea for the company came about at the end of December 2008 and started its activities in the summer of 2009, after the hedge fund were Virginia assumed a financial role went under.
With 40.000 pounds of her own capital, she started the UK version of ‘proven concept’ recruitment portal Bountyjobs, but not as a franchise but totally independent as the people from Bountyjobs had indicated to Virginia that they had no interest in starting in the UK.
The proven concept is a disruptive model that puts the employer in first place on the website by starting a tender process for agencies, who then can decide themselves whether they are interested to help fulfil a vacancy. When a vacancy is fulfilled, Talentpuzzle sends out and invoice and keeps 25% of the commission earned by the agency.
The Route to get an Investor on Board Read more
Where are the Women in VC backed Startups? Here’s some Data to Complete…
This is a guest post by Astia, an organisation assisting women-led high growth finance companies in their route to VC financing, and a partner of The NextWomen. Sarah Travel of Bessemer Ventures has collected data about women in VC backed companies.
I speak to venture backed startups all the time. Unfortunately, more often than not, I don’t see a single female on the executive team roster. Over time, I’ve developed a hypothesis. For some reason, in the rare occurrence when I speak to a female CEO, it’s felt to me that I’m much more likely to find another female face on the company roster. It got me curious: Is this true? Are there actually more female executives in female-CEO led companies than male-led companies? If so, there are a number of implications.
To answer this question, Christine Klemke, COO of Sense Networks and I have done some good old fashioned data collecting. Unfortunately, this has been a much more time consuming task than we had expected, so we’ve only gone through the US portfolio of three VCs: Accel, my firm Bessemer, and Sequoia (210 companies in total).
Given the small sample size, and the hot-button nature of the subject, let me first disclose what this data set is *not*:
So what did I find in the intial sample?
- There were 1219 male executives (90% of sample) vs. 134 female executives (10% of sample).
- 3.8% of the CEOs were women (8 out of 210). (Which coincidentally, is around the percentage of women who are CEO of a Fortune 500 company – 3%.)
- 125 of the 210 companies (60%) did not have a single female on the executive team.
Business Plan Competition: Cartier is Looking for Exceptional Female Entrepreneurs
Cartier is looking for Exceptional Entrepreneurs through a Business plan Competition. Recognising entrepreneurs as having “the audacity to create, to innovate, and to imagine the future,” the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards is an international social entrepreneurship competition for women who lead creative, sustainable and socially responsible enterprises in the start-up phase (no older than 3 years).
There will be 5 winners, 1 from each continent, Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America.
Candidates, who can be from any country, are invited to apply online by presenting their
business project through www.cartierwomensinitiative.com
Deadline for applications is March 10, 2010.
Funding & Grants For Karen Darby’s New Social Venture Call Britania
Call Britannia, which is headed by Karen Darby, the founder of price comparison site Simply Switch, has secured a total of almost £1.3m in investment and funding to help it set up work training call centres in some of the UK’s most deprived neighbourhoods. The deal was closed at the end of 2009, and already has resulted in the first of the planned call centres to be opened.
The Team of Call Brittania
The Bridges Social Entrepreneurs Fund has invested £500,000, Big Issue Invest has invested £350,000 and the management team of Call Britannia has itself invested £150,000. Darby has also secured £292,500 from the government’s Future Jobs Fund to help it create 45 jobs in Croydon in the next six months.
Call Brittania is serial entrepreneur and call centre expert Karen Darby’s latest venture. She has worked with Bridges Ventures in the past when the venture capital company invested in her third company Simply Switch, which was sold to the media group Daily Mail and General Trust plc for £22m in 2006. She sold her first call centre firm, The Decisions Group, for £800,000 in 1990.
In March 2009 she was named as one of Britain’s 100 Most Entrepreneurial Women by Real Business magazine and Bank of Scotland. About her entrepreneurial life she says:
“It seems to me the toughest thing about success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success.” Read more
Millions of Funding, Two Prizes and a Commercial Deal for Women Led Mobile Startup Layar
The Female Internet Hero strikes more than once. Dutch company Layar, led by Claire Boonstra, who we interviewed some time ago as one of the most inspiring women in tech has been judged the winner of two prizes at the Mobile Premier Awards, at Mobile World Congress. Layar was voted the Best Start Up in Marketing and Best Start Up in Entertainment.
And if that was not enough, the company announced that it has received additional funding of 2.5 million Euro from Sunstone Capital and Prime Technology Ventures, in order to further facilitate its international roll out and reach mainstream businesses.
Finally, already more than one million people have found the application for their own use, while Layar announced that it has reached agreement with one of the top 3 mobile handset manufacturers for a global distribution partnership, which will increase its user base considerably.
The Layar platform allows brands, game developers, publishers and producers to engage with customers through the creation of rich immersive real world experiences. As of mid March 2010, all Layar producers and publishers will be able to generate a return from their investment in AR. They can offer both free and paid content through the Layar platform.
Report: Women-owned or Led Firms are Becoming a Leading Entrepreneurial force in Technology
“New research shows what many have long suspected: women entrepreneurs are poised to lead the next wave of growth in global technology ventures.”
Cindy Padnos of Illuminate Ventures
This is conclusion from the very thorough research on entrepreneurial women in tech, called High Performance Entrepreneurs: Women in High Tech, performed by a team led by founder and CEO Cindy Padnos of Illuminate Ventures, a venture fund that focuses on women led companies. Women are more efficient, have fewer failures, submit more patents, and start more companies and are heavily involved in IPO’s. But is not all sunny: there still very few female investors, while women take on less capital than men. Here’s a summary
“Report: High Performance Entrepreneurs: Women in High Tech
The report, prepared by Illuminate Ventures, documents the out-performance of women entrepreneurs in the past decade and the trends that are propelling them towards critical mass in the high-tech sector.
- Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency: The high-tech companies that women build are more capital-efficient than the norm. The average venture-backed company run by a woman had annual revenues that were 12 percent higher, using an average of one-third less committed capital.
- Big Progress in Recent Times: More women are serving as officers of venture-backed companies with successful exits. In 1988, only 4% of the 134 firms that went public in the U.S. had women in top management positions growing to over 41% percent by 2004. Of 2009’s 19 high-tech IPOs, all but two had at least one woman officer.
- Fewer Failures: Despite often being capital-constrained, women-owned businesses are more likely to survive the transition from raw start-up to established company than the average. Read more
5 Women Led Companies benefit from 2010 Uptake in Funding through Astia Venture Accelerator Program
Astia, a premier venture accelerator that targets exceptional start-ups that have women on their founding teams, has seen a significant uptake in investment activity. Already in 2010, five clients have secured funding including HarQen which completed their $2.7 million Series A financing. Investors include Phenomenelle Angels Fund, Silicon Pastures, Golden Seeds Angel Fund, Midwest Capital Fund, Wisconsin Investment Partners and several prominent individuals.
HarQen, an Astia supported Company
“I found Astia to be a brilliant resource in connecting us not simply with investors, but an amazing cadre of talented women and Advisors. Thanks to the coaching and perspectives we gained at Astia, we received an incredibly warm reception from new investors in a relatively cold market,” commented Kelly Fitzsimmons, CEO, HarQen.
The success of Astia’s clients is credited to the broader Astia Community that sources, selects, and advises the companies that qualify for Astia’s prestigious program.
At Astia’s Annual Investor Forum in Silicon Valley the investment community was introduced to the 33 exceptional women-led start-ups. Read more
Twentysomething Millionaire launches Early Stage Fund for Social Gaming
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Oprah Winfrey described Indian born serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal as “living the American dream”. Fact is that he knows how to start, build and sell a company. According to Sprouter, he sold his first business, Click Agents, two years after starting up for $40 million, and his second company, BlueLithium, was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007 for $300 million. He is currently growing his third startup gWallet. And that’s far before he turns 30 years old.
Chahal wants to bring this quality to other startup entrepreneurs and so he has launched an early-state venture fund, gWallet Ventures, that will invest in social gaming and online gaming companies. The fund will provide initial funds from $100k to $1 million to start-ups to develop and market their game. According to their blog:
We are currently looking for companies to invest in (our criteria is fairly simple—if you have fun games, we’re probably interested), and we’re excited to choose our first portfolio company. We plan on playing an active role with all of the companies we invest in, and we’ll do our part to make sure the best games out there are brought to the masses.
Intention is to be working directly with the entrepreneurs, such as gaming developers on Facebook and MySpace, that receive early-state venture funds to help in all business aspects, and especially with the monetization of games, through the gWallet company. And there they also will meet Rebecca Watson for business development, who has a track record with Real Girls Media where she helped launch the company’s owned and operated site DivineCaroline.com and led all syndication, licensing, content sourcing and partnership development. Additionally, she founded the Real Girls Network, a premium advertising network connecting women’s blogs and communities with Fortune 500 brands.
Anyone who is not interesting in the Fund, may be nonetheless interested in the Entrepreneurial Lessons of the serial entrepreneur, as listed on Sprouter:
- Hire only rockstars to work at your company
- Don’t expect free help Read more
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